oBravo Unveils Cupid Basic IEM
oBravo have a fair number of IEMs in their portfolio, as well as a couple of full-sized headphones and a headphone amplifier too. However, one of their most interesting IEMs is the £249 Cupid , and now they have released a more budget-friendly version called the Cupid Basic .
Generally, most earphones tend to use traditional dynamic-driver designs, and then there are a large portion that use balanced-armatures. Often we’ll see multi-BA driver setups whereby the manufacturer can even cram as many as a dozen or more balanced-armature drivers into each earpiece. A perhaps more common and cost-effective solution is what’s called a hybrid-driver configuration whereby a dynamic-driver can be used for the lower frequencies, and a single or multi-BA setup is used to handle the mid-range and high frequencies. Some IEMs, such as the T2from Tin HiFi can even use dual dynamic drivers rather than a hybrid setup. More recently, we’ve seen an increase in the number of IEMs that feature planar-magnetic drivers, and this is what makes the Cupid so interesting.
It’s of a hybrid design, but not one that involves any balanced-armature drivers, instead it features both a traditional dynamic driver, as well as a planar-magnetic driver configuration.
The Cupid was originally available in 3 different variants, all of which featured a removable OCC litz which is terminated to a 2.5mm balanced jack. The Prime variant is supplied with a 2.5mm-to-3.5mm adapter, whereas the Ultimate variant gets you both the 2.5mm-to-3.5mm adapter as well as a 2.5mm-to-4.4mm adapter.
So, where does the Cupid Basic fit into all of this? Well, the Basic still gets you an OCC cable, but this one is terminated to a regular single-ended 3.5mm jack, meaning that it would be compatible with a much wider variety of music players and other audio devices without the need of any adaptors .
Whether or not there is any other difference between the cable used on the Basic and that of the Prime and Ultimate versions is unclear, but the Basic also comes with a substantial price-cut as it will only set you back £169.
